Beasts From the East: Gennady Golovkin

With the highest knockout percentage of any middleweight champion in history, Gennady Golovkin is the most explosively violent beast of the bunch. The 165-pounder is brutally adept at discovering weaknesses quickly and exploiting them with his superior technique, devastating power, and precision punching. Born in Karaganda, a grim Kazakh coal-mining town, Golovkin was encouraged by his older brothers to pursue a more lucrative career in boxing. To inspire a sense of fearlessness in him, they would take him into the streets late at night and pick out a thug. “You afraid of him?” they’d ask. “No,” Golovkin would reply. “Prove it,” they’d say. Golovkin, 32, attacks his opponents with the same bold and unforgiving fury. The 2004 Olympic silver medalist’s curse may be that he’s such a savage puncher, he’s so far been unable to land a big fight with a marquee opponent. “That’s the problem,” says Golovkin’s trainer, Abel Sanchez. “We don’t really know how good he can be.”